optical discs of rewritable type (-RW type) capable of free recording of data by users, write-once type (-R type), and corresponding optical disc apparatuses have heretofore been in widespread use.
For the purpose of further increasing the recording capacity, Blu-ray Disc (registered trademark) has been developed which uses blue laser light (405 nm in wavelength) of wavelength shorter than those of known CDs (Compact Discs) and DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs). The Blu-ray Disc also includes a rewritable type BD-RE and a write-once type BD-R (for example, see Patent Document 1).    Patent Document 1: Jpn. Pat. Appln. Publication No. 2006-024287.
Among video recording apparatuses such as a stationary video recorder and a hand-held video camera, ones which are configured to record a video picture on an optical disc, instead of magnetic tapes theretofore in use, have become prevalent recently. These video recording apparatuses using an optical disc require that stream data on a video picture supplied from the outside or on a video picture while shooting be recorded on the optical disc in real time.
Then, the above real-time recording of stream data on the optical disc allows no interruption of recording due to recording errors, if any, since the stream data to be recorded continues to be supplied in succession. The stream data is required to be recorded so that it can be reproduced without interruption.
To meet such requirements, for example, hitherto known ATAPI drive operations defined in MMC can be used. In this case, the drive transmits a recording error notification to the host in response to the occurrence of a recording error, and then erases all the stream data in the drive data buffer. In response to reception of the recording error notification, the host reissues a WRITE instruction for another address and retransmits the stream data to the drive, whereby the data is recorded at the another address of the optical disc. The host then rewrites the file system information to combine the pieces of stream data logically so that the stream data can be recorded so as to be reproducible without interruption.
With such recording operations, however, the host must store stream data until the drive finishes recording the data, which requires a host data buffer of increased capacity. In addition, the host needs to retransmit already transmitted stream data to the drive after the occurrence of a recording error, with the disadvantage of wasting data transmission time.
Using the TSR (Timely Safe Recording) method defined in MMC-5, recording errors, if any, may be ignored to continue recording in the first phase. In the second phase, the vicinities of data undergoing the recording errors may be relocated to enable restoration of all the data undergoing the recording errors. However, there has been a problem of requiring a large volume of host data buffer, because the host must store all the data transmitted to the drive in the period until the reallocation.